I have been struggling with tech this week!

I’ve recently changed my local development setup and I’ll be honest it’s been a learning curve! I’ve had a lot of support from the community though and I’m so grateful for the time given by those who’ve chipped in to lend a hand. Especially those on Slack and in the UK WP Community, changing things and learning something new is not easy, it has its challenges, particularly when you already have to a business to run and need to meet client deadlines.

This got me thinking about tech in general… there is so much out there that it’s slightly overwhelming to be honest. You can sometimes feel you’re simply getting left behind or you just can’t keep up! Something particularly resonated with me when I was referred to this tweet…

In the early days of ‘desktop publishing’, yeah I know, you don’t hear that much these days do you! I remember things being so intuitive and simple to use, from using software to adjusting your fancy Apple Mac to do just what you wanted it to do, now the software is so complex that you can pretty much do the same thing about 100 different ways! I remember educating fellow workers in the studio I used to work at about how to do some simple things like masking or retouching, now I work in web development the choices I have are immense, what server to set up, what local development environment to work with, whether to use preprocessors or not, learning more javascript…. gees!! I have very little time in my life as it is to justify making more time to just fiddle with stuff and learn as you go… now it’s not just about getting stuff done!

I hopped on to Zac Gordon’s Javascript workshop yesterday and there was what seemed like simple conversations being had by the host to an online community of some 400+ watchers, the flavour of the conversations were things like “you need a local server setup with an installation of WordPress to work along with… what setup are you guys using…?” Well, at this point the chat goes bonkers, I even chipped in with my own “I’ve recently switched to Valet…” but there were things mentioned that would scare any on looking newbie for sure!

It’s not just getting stuff done in web dev either, there’s simply running a business, sales funnels, social media, communication tools, SEO, phone technology…. it feels like knowing a lot of things just isn’t enough these days! You have to be savvy and aware of practically everything.

Why does everything have to be so complicated!!! Mark Wilkinson 2019

I guess I’m just ranting because it feels like I’ve had a particularly bad and nonproductive week.

I’d like to recognise a few people who’ve given up their time in the last few weeks.

Ross Wintle for spending about 2hours with me diagnosing and helping me fix my weird local Apache setup.

Gabor Javorszky for helping me correctly hook up PHP versions and Valet.

Tim Nash for SSH, PHP hosting settings and general wp-cli tips.

Richard Bell for PHP root path/images bug assistance whilst on holiday in Berlin (hopeful this will cancel the invoice out 🙂 )

And a big thanks to the UK WP Community for just being there, even though I feel like I’ve been fairly demanding these last few weeks.

When you’re feeling unmotivated and deflated a simple “how I’m feeling…” dropped into the #general channel helps A LOT! Having reached out to them just this morning and writing this I’m already feeling less overwhelmed and deflated so thank you 🙂

If you’re feeling a little out of sorts I urge you to do the same, a simple opening up will make the world of difference so don’t forget to keep talking people, things are not as complicated as you think.

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *